Fast, furious and sillybut fun in a Bond way

movies - review

September 2, 2005|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie Critic

A new Bond? Who cares? Who needs Bond?

We've got The Transporter.

The second installment of this French-engineered, Brit-starring Hong Kong-styled action series is more slam-bang and much sillier than the original. It loses some of The Transporter's lean, mean minimalism and crosses right over into Bond far-fetchedness in its plot and stunts. But it's still a noisy, goofy, cartoonishly violent ride.

This time, our transporter, played by bullet-headed, rule-spouting Jason Statham, is running his particular brand of delivery service in Miami. But this methodical, super-skilled ex-Special Forces getaway driver has been reduced to taking a rich kid to and from school.

At least he's teaching the boy (Hunter Clary) "the rules."

"Respect a man's car, and the man respects you."

He tells the kid he'll never let anything happen to him. He tells the kid to never make a promise you can't keep.

And then the kid is kidnapped.

Our transporter is kind of warm for the boy's mom -- ex-model Amber Valletta. She's depending on him because her drug-enforcement politico hubbie (Matthew Modine) is useless.

But what can you do when an international terrorist "with perfect syntax" (Alessandro Gassman) is bent on doing something with a virus to the kid and maybe the rest of Miami?

You get to transporting, that's what you do. Statham, with the aid of stunt doubles, chases bad guys and is chased by the feds all over sexy pre-Katrina South Florida. Cars, JetSkis, a helicopter and a private jet come into play.

The transporter relentlessly tracks the bad guys with the aid of the French cop (Francois Berleand, brought back for comic relief) all with an eye toward a showdown with another model, murderous and ever-undressed Lola, played by model-actress-singer Kate Nauta.

Casting in these movies is for effect. The first one had a Chinese director and Asian overtones. This one has the same martial-arts director, Corey Yuen, so the fights are even more spectacular. They work because Statham, an ex-Olympic diver, can remake himself into a British Jet Li -- call him Brit Lee.

But this Transporter is all about design -- from the slick Audi our driver works over on the job, to the always rain-slicked indoor parking garages (makes for a cool, illogical look), to producer Luc Besson's thing for emaciated models. He directed La Femme Nikita and The Professional, and married and tried to make a star out of model-actress-singer Milla Jovovich. He cast Valletta and Nauta, two non-actresses with perfect cheekbones, all jutting lines and overstyled hair and little flair for acting.

Gassman, the son of Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, makes for an interesting "type" saddled with a loony story of Bondian pretensions.

Transporter 2 is, like the original, loaded with action fun. But a recent re-viewing of The Transporter on DVD shows that, reduced to TV size, the plot springs leaks, and the brawls, car, boat and plane crashes look like what they plainly are -- fake.

If you really want to be transported by this one, better see it on the big screen.